Eric’s Comments (group member since Jul 10, 2012)

Eric’s comments from the Q&A with Eric Red group.

In terms of the horror market in films presently, there's no question that the financiers have a hard-on for contained genre pieces, because of the low budget production cost outlay and high profit margins. From a creative standpoint, those have often been the best horror films to begin with. The real challenge when you're doing a contained horror piece with a few characters is coming up with a strong central concept and conflict, and generating enough twists and complications within those limited parameters to keep the audience interested. You kind of make a deal with the audience at the beginning saying this whole story is going to take place right here, with just these people, and I'm going to keep you on the edge of your seat. Then you have to deliver, and many of those stories don't.

Just the reverse, seems to me. It's interesting that many of the books popular with Y/A readers like the Harry Potters, Hunger Games and others deal thematically with young people being brave facing the threat of utter annihilation, or having to kill their friends to survive. That seems to be in the mythological consciousness of teenagers today, who seem a more hard-nosed generation than ours. I worry sometimes whether kids today have no childhoods.

Excited to hear what you think, Donny!

One of the coolest things for me about writing a novel as opposed to making a film is that readers bring their own pictures to the prose, instead of you giving them those pictures in a movie. In that sense, people interface with books more than films. In the case of horror, readers bringing their own personal and private images to the story can be much scarier, can't it?

A lot of the responsibility has to do with the morality of the piece and the author being sure his or her theme has the right human values. That's more significant than the amount of sex or violence required to tell certain stories. Sometimes graphic is good, but many of times it's not how you show it, it's how you don't show it, because then the audience or reader films in the blanks and their own imagination can be much more powerful.

There's also a peculiar double standard in America where strong levels of violence are acceptable in current pop culture but sex is taboo to a surprising degree, even though it's less harmful. Not so outside the US. Probably the puritanical heritage in this country.

Nothing wrong with tense and claustrophobic scenarios. Most great horror movies involve a handful of characters in an isolated setting facing a monster or threat. I believe all good horror movies have a B movie storyline as the core, and I mean B movie the best sense of the word.

Screenplays are all about showing who the characters are through external action and dialogue, and doing it as tersely as possible. Novels allow the luxury of telling what the characters are thinking and feeling as well. Story development I think is very similar in a book and a film--but in a screenplay the scene progression should usually be linear and a novel lets you jump back and forth in time and follow the points of views of multiple characters. In DON'T STAND SO CLOSE I found it liberating as an author to be able to get the reader inside a lot of characters' heads and tell the story through several viewpoints. Writing a novel you have an arsenal of storytelling tools at your disposal you don't have writing screenplays. On the other hand, writing a good screenplay requires rigorous narrative and structural skills novelists don't always possess--in a script, nothing's wasted.

Ships that pass in the night! Let me email my address to you on FB.

Comics certainly. When I did my comic series CONTAINMENT, it involved telling a horror story in largely visual terms using the paneling. It required writing incredibly detailed terror and gore images and atmospherics for the artist to render. The process was reminiscent of film storyboarding and like writing a screenplay and director shot list at the same time.

Nice to meet you, Duane. Hi Sandy, I believe we know each another:) No, no further signings scheduled presently until Killercon 4 in Las Vegas in September, but I if you send me a copy of the book I'll happily sign one for you!

Thanks for stopping by. Please introduce yourself. Feel free to ask me any questions at all and I'll answer as best as I can.

There's a lot of effective techniques in the mechanics of engineering terror, tension and suspense on the page. Let's discuss some of those.

There are a lot of big differences writing a screenplay and writing a novel, but also major similarities. If any of you have gone from writing scripts to books or the other way around, would love to hear your experiences as well.

In this book I tried to deal with sexuality and violence both physical and emotional, that can be a major part of the teenage experience in an honest and responsible manner. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about edgy Y/A material in general.

Don't Stand So Close explores the emotional lives and perspectives of several teens—Matt, Grace and Rusty—in a small midwestern town. It deals with their experiences with one another in terms of friendship, romance and sex, mostly as it relates to Linda, a serial sexual predator female teacher who impacts their lives with profound consequences. I tried to capture both the wonder and darkness of sexual awakening at that age, where it’s all amazing and new but what you don’t know can hurt you—and do this in a thriller context.

If you have any questions about Don't Stand So Close, feel free to ask them here and I'll do my best to address them. If you haven't read the book, particularly if you like my films, I think you'll enjoy it.